I maintain a small club membership database in FileMaker Pro, and needed to mail the menbers. I had a look at different add-ons for FM Pro, but found none with the simplicity I needed. But the solution is simple. Export all the email addresses as tab-delimited text, open the file in a text editor and replace the paragraph marks with commas (name@mail.com,name2@mail.com, ...). Copy the entire text, switch to Entourage and open a new message window. Control- (or right-) click in either the To, Cc or Bcc field and paste the addresses in. It worked with my 40-something recipients, but there is probably an upper limit.

[Editor's note: Yes, there are legitimate reasons to mass email a group of people, so please don't attack this post on the grounds of encouraging spam. Besides, using cut and paste and Entourage is not going to be the preferred method of most spammers! As an aside, when I have to send emails to a group of people, I always paste the addresses in the "bcc" field, and then insert my own email address (or a fictitious one on my domain) in the "To" field -- protecting other people's email addresses when you send out an announcement is a Very Good Thing to do!]

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Does it have to be that hard?
Authored by: torndownunit on Dec 19, '02 12:03:42PM

I might be missing something. For my mass emails (My band's mailing list), I create a Group in Entourage. You can then paste all the email addresses into the to Group and save it. You can click a check box which gives you the option to not display the emails addresses of the group when it sends the email. So all the email addresses are protected, and your Group is saved for next time. This seems like the easiest method and it protects others privacy.

That's not exactly true. Entourage does limit the number of addressees you can send to. From my experience, it's up around 150 or so. However, when addressing to groups, I don't think there is a cap on the number of addresses you can have in the group.

Example: You can send an e-mail to 150 people or also send it to 150 groups (say with 200 addresses per group)

I'm not positive the cap is 150, but I did try a mailer with 300 folks and ended up having to break it up into several chunks.

Does it have to be that hard?
Authored by: Mac112 on Dec 21, '02 08:54:34AM

I don't know why f9k-a was quoted for my hint, but anyway:
The hint was ment for others, who as I, are focusing on snail-mail as the primary way of contact, like sending printed magazines and so on, but occasionally needs to send email. I'm well aware of Entourage's capabilities in its own field.

This is a pretty roundabout technique to mass e-mail using FileMaker, but the results are the same. I, too, have to manage a good quantity of group mailers (from press contacts, to organzitional members, to local affiliates, etc.). From my experience, Entourage can handle up to about 150 contacts in one go. Though a ListServer is more efficient and allows for communication between subscribers, for micromessaging, Entourage gets the job done.

Curious about the issue of limits as I have about 250 in my group and haven't seen any problems in monthly mailings.

I'm thinking about listservs too, but the software on our host for our club doesn't support attachments and our monthly mailing is a newsletter.

Lastly when a new member signs up I Cmd-Y or is it Cmd + to add to my address book, but I have to manually add it to the list. Is there an easier way than opening up the address book, then opening up the list, clicking add, and adding. Anothe reason I don't like this method is that it's too easy to mess up the list and I have inadvertently backspaced out the name of the list.

I run a student Amnesty group in southern califronia in my university and i send messages to about 133 people in my club.

When i put them all as "bcc" or whatever it gets filtered as spam in peoples boxes. I found this max mailer program that lets me insert tags and stuff to make the messages seem more personal and also send them individually so they don't get filtered as spam.

If anyone has another way of doing this that doesn't require purchasing Max mailer (i have no money :( can you share it?

You get around that problem as well just using Entourage's Groups function. It sends a personalized email to each person in the group. It does not use the BCC field. As mentioned all you have to do is check the option "Don't Show Addresses When Sending To Group". These emails will not be affected by general junk mail filters. One of the reasons Entourage is a cool app.

I have good experience with exporting the relevant fields, including the e-mail addresses in merge format and use this file in Word as a datafile for e-mail-merge to Entourage.
In that way each recepient receives his or her own personalized e-mail. There will also be no restrictions by the smtp-server, although the mail send queue may be limited by teh provider which can easily be solved by sending only a limited number of e-mails in one run.